| |
Holly
––––––––
AS WE PULLED UP TO the bed-and-breakfast, I remembered I’d told Vint we were going to have a big reveal for the tree the next day, which was problematic considering that meant we had to get the giant thing inside without anyone noticing. I had Lawson drive over to the parking area and check to see how many cars were there. There was only one, and I was fairly certain that one belonged to the couple that had arranged for a gingerbread-man-decorating class at the bakery in town for the afternoon.
“I think we’re clear,” I said. “We should be able to get it inside without anybody seeing it.”
He pulled up close to the garage, and we got out to untie the tight ropes that kept it on the top of his car. I felt like I should be singing some sort of Christmas-slanted Mission Impossible theme as we brought the tree behind the garage to cut off the net bundled around it. I’d originally thought that was something we could just do in the living room, but when I saw how the branches popped out into place, I realized this was definitely an outside kind of activity.
“Do you have a stand?” Lawson asked as we made our way through the back door, which was positioned closer to the living room, where we were going to set up the tree.
“That’s a question that would have been a whole lot more helpful about two hours ago.”
“I’m thinking that means no,” he said.
“Not necessarily no,” I said. “I just don’t know. I can’t remember if we had a separate stand for the tree or not. I think that it was just attached. But like I said, there are some things up in the attic, there might be one up there.”
“But what are we going to do with the tree until we find out?” Lawson said. “We disconnected it from the ground. It’s not going to stand up on its own anymore.”
We were most of the way to the living room when we had to turn around and shuffle back outside to lean the tree against the back of the garage. I patted it gently and asked it not to fall over and get ruined before we could get back, then headed inside and up to the attic.
“Most of this stuff was my grandmother’s,” I say, gesturing around to the boxes and crates taking up a good portion of the floor space in the attic. “I inherited everything when she died, and I thought I got rid of a lot of it, but it just kept multiplying when I brought it up here. There are some things in the corners that were just here when I got here. I don’t know if they were left by previous owners or if my grandmother bought them for the bed-and-breakfast. I haven’t really gone through it.”
“Well, now’s the time,” Lawson said. “You start on this side, and I’ll start over there.”
We looked over the piles of stuff and at each other.
“Or we could just go to Mary and Brighton’s and get a new one,” I suggested.
Lawson nodded, and we headed back down the steps that led into the attic. Then it was off to town again and into the general store, where we claimed one of the last handful of tree stands they were selling. I eyed the inflatable decorations as we went past. They were growing on me. I still didn’t know if I was at that place in my life when I could actually consider putting one in the yard, but I kind of had the urge to go up and hug the snowman now. Maybe it was just the Christmas tree fumes getting to me.
We took the new stand home and put it in the corner, then lugged the tree in again. It took several minutes of finagling to figure out how to get it placed perfectly in the stand and the screws firmly holding it in place. Then we had to turn and twist it to find just the right angle so it looked its most glorious. At one point, Lawson went to the side of the room and crouched down.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m trying to make myself Vint’s height so I can see what it would look like to him,” he said. “It’s going to be really important to him, so I want to make sure it looks as good as it can.”
“That is bringing things to a whole other level,” I said.
He grinned as he straightened. “Just being true to the sugar plum fairy’s wishes.”
“I want that to sound less terrifying than it did.”
Lawson laughed. “Come on. Let’s go get the ornaments.”
We went back up to the attic. Fortunately, I knew exactly where I’d left the couple of boxes of Christmas decorations I’d saved. We got them and carried them back down into the living room to go through. Opening them up brought out a puff of air that smelled like Christmas. Not the kind of smelling like Christmas that came with cinnamon rolls or a fresh tree. It was the smell of cardboard and old pine-scented ornaments, wrapping paper, and gingerbread candles. They were the first smells of Christmas I remembered. They were the ones that came when my grandmother decided it was time to decorate and we got out the decorations along with the plastic tree.
“I remember these,” I said, reaching into the box to pull out a couple of the ornaments carefully tucked inside. “I made these when I was in school.” I gave a short laugh as I examined the old crafts. “I can’t believe she kept all of them.”
“Why wouldn’t she?” Lawson asked. “She loved you, and you made them. That’s a big part of Christmas. She liked looking back on when you were little and loved that you made something for her.”
I held one of the ornaments, a reindeer put together with brown-painted Popsicle sticks with googly eyes and a red pom-pom for the nose. The pom-pom was matted from years of going in and out of boxes. There were some chips taken out of the brown paint on the wood, and one of the googly eyes was stuck up in the corner of the clear dome, but it brought a smile to my face.
“There’s one kind of like this in here somewhere that was a frame and had a picture of me from when I was little in it,” I said.
“I definitely need to see that,” Lawson said.
I set the reindeer aside and dug deeper into the box. Some of the fragile ornaments were wrapped in pieces of newspaper. The more ornaments I pulled out, the more years I discovered. A lot were from the year that they were last packed, but others came from more distant years with tears and yellowing that told me the same pieces were used over and over. When I touched them, I remembered unwrapping them and tossing the paper aside. I never noticed my grandmother rescuing some of the pieces to use again.
“It’s like a time capsule,” I said. “Look at these newspapers.”
Lawson turned his head to the side to read one of the papers. “We now have documentation of the cost of those onion things that go on green bean casserole fifteen years ago.”
“That’s vital information,” I said. “I’m glad to have it.”
He laughed and nodded. “We learn all kinds of things when we decorate for Christmas.”
“My grandmother and I had a tree-decorating party every year,” I said.
“You did?” he asked.
I nodded. “It’s not as fancy as it sounds. We were the only people there. But we made a ton of snacks and put them out like we were going to have a lot of guests, then ate it the whole time we got everything out and decorated the tree, then watched TV specials. You know those weird bright orange and red cheese balls with the nuts all over them?”
“Yeah,” Lawson said, carefully unwrapping another of the ornaments.
“I thought they were so elegant when I was a kid. They were just the epitome of fancy Christmas food. So my grandmother always bought them for me and put them on a plate with what seemed like a billion different flavors of crackers and this cute little cheese spreader that had a snowman on top.” I smiled. “I don’t know why that’s such a vivid memory.”
“You went through all that and never had anyone come?” Lawson asked.
“Well, we did one year. I invited my boyfriend in high school,” I said. I couldn’t help but notice the look on Lawson’s face. It was one step away from him rolling his eyes.
“Just one year?” he asked.
“Yeah. I thought it would be so memorable and romantic. We were supposed to make all these wonderful memories and have that perfect holiday kiss under the mistletoe. The whole Hallmark movie extravaganza. I was actually really looking forward to all of it. I thought maybe this was going to be the thing that broke my Christmas funk.”
“Make your heart grow to three times its size?” Lawson asked.
I nodded. “Something like that. But when it finally came, it was nothing like what I wanted it to be. He thought it was dumb that we made so much food and made such a big deal out of just the two of us decorating. He made fun of the ornaments and wouldn’t help hang the lights. He just wanted to get it over with so we could go out with his friends.
“I told my grandmother he was just playing around, trying to be silly. That he thought he was funny and that he was just really shy and that was the only way he knew how to act. I could tell it upset her, but she was willing to go along with it because of how wrapped up in him I was. The next year, I invited him to come again, hoping he would be better. I felt like since we’d been together for so long that he would take it more seriously and care about how I felt.”
“I’m guessing he acted the exact same way,” Lawson said.
“Actually, no,” I said. “He didn’t even have the chance to. He refused to come. He just said he had better things to do and wasn’t going to waste his time decorating a tree with my grandmother. But if I wanted to meet up with him after, he was going to a really fun party and we would have a room to ourselves for the night.”
Lawson looked both shocked and disgusted, and I couldn’t blame him. All through high school, the quarterback and I were seen as the golden couple. We were perfect, and everyone aspired to be just like us. I bought into that hook, line, and sinker. I thought since everyone else thought we were the best thing going, that meant we were. We were clearly relationship goals before hashtags even existed, and I was just being too sensitive or too clingy if I thought I should have anything else.
It wasn’t until long after he was gone that I really forced myself to see the truth about him and about our relationship.
“Can I ask you something?” Lawson asked a few seconds later when I’d started adding hooks to the ornaments.
“Apparently you can since you just did,” I said.
“You’re one of those people,” he said.
“Yes, I am.”
“Why did you stay with that guy for so long?” he asked. “He was such a jerk.”
Well, I certainly walked myself right into that one with my little trip down memory lane.
“I didn’t realize he was,” I said.
“You didn’t realize he was a jerk?” Lawson asked. “How is that possible? I watched him from the outside of your little bubble, and I could still see what an awful guy he was. That he never treated you for a second like you deserved to be treated. That always made me so mad. You should have had so much more.”
“I thought because he was popular and good-looking, I was lucky to have him. All the girls in the school were falling all over themselves to have him notice them, and I was the one he chose to be with. I’d gone on a couple of dates before him, but he was my first real boyfriend. As soon as we were together, I was so much more important and visible than I’d ever been.
“And I realize now is probably not the time to pull out the orphan card, but I wasn’t old enough to really have memories of my parents as a couple. My grandfather died when I was really little, too, so I didn’t have any good relationships to model after. I watched people around me date, and I figured as long as he wasn’t hitting me or cheating on me, then everything was good.
“Of course, now that I’m an adult, I realize he was more than likely cheating on me with anything that wore a bra, but I didn’t think about that at the time. People told us we were a great couple, so I thought we were a great couple. I didn’t stop to wonder if maybe they were saying that only because they wanted to impress him, too,” I said.
“Well, I can tell you from somebody looking from the outside in, he wasn’t anything you should have been with. You deserved so much more than that,” Lawson said.
My heartbeat raced in my chest, and I forced myself to go back to sorting through the ornaments. It was more nostalgic and emotional than I thought it would be, and combined with what Lawson said, I was feeling a bit breathless.
“I’ll be right back,” he said after a little while of us organizing the ornaments in silence. “I just need to go do something really fast.”
I nodded, and he rushed out. I took him being gone as the opportunity to get out of the living room and away from the tree and decorations. I went into the kitchen and put together the afternoon snack to put out in the parlor. I hadn’t heard any of the other guests come back yet, but I wanted to make sure there was something waiting for them when they did.
With the food out in its usual spot, I went back into the kitchen and had a snack of my own while staring out the window. I didn’t know how long I’d been there when I heard Lawson calling me from the living room. I went back and found him with a box in his arms and another at his feet.
“What’s all this?” I asked.
“These are ornaments from my family. They’ve been in storage for a long time,” he said.
“In storage?” I asked.
Lawson put down the box in his hands and nodded, a slightly saddened look coming over his face.
“I told you I’m here visiting my mother for the holidays,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, nodding as I came further into the room.
“What I didn’t tell you is that her health putting her in the assisted living facility means I am now responsible for going through all of her things and handling kind of the life she left on the outside. She sold the house without having me be a part of it but then put almost everything into storage. I have to go through it and figure out what to do with everything. That’s a big part of why I’m here for so long. I need to get that taken care of. “
“Wow,” I said, knowing that was a completely ridiculous reaction but also feeling like it was the most genuine one I could have. I didn’t realize he was going through so much. “But the ornaments. Those are special.”
“I know,” Lawson said. “That’s why I’m bringing them here. Most of the stuff in those storage units will probably get donated or thrown away, to be honest. And she can’t have these in with her. I would really love to know they are being loved and appreciated by hanging on the tree here. If that’s something you would want to do.”
All I could do was stand and wrap my arms around his neck. “Of course I would.” I lingered there for a second too long and felt the draw to him pulse between us. I stepped back, needing to cool down, and looked up at him. “Thank you.”
“Thank you.”
